The party based on the liberal coasts benefits when presidential primary voters to drag it to the center, but the Midwestern and Southern one doesn't need the push further right.

DES MOINES -- As front-runner after front-runner has surged and then collapsed in GOP presidential primary polling, one long-time front-runner facing a fresh spate of scrutiny is the state of Iowa itself.

The unfair advantage the Hawkeye State has as the first state in the nation to weigh in during presidential contests is a topic of quadrennial debate, but it's picked up new attention this year as one unlikely pick after another has surged to the front of the Iowa polling pack.

First House Tea Party Caucus founder Michele Bachmann won the Ames straw poll in August, with libertarian Texas Rep. Ron Paul -- he of the racist newsletters and calls to abolish the Federal Reserve and opposition to most federal rights-protecting laws -- coming in a close second. Then former Godfather's Pizza executive Herman Cain, never having held elective office, had a moment as the Iowa darling, soaring to the front of the pack in an October Des Moines Register Iowa Poll. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich took Cain's place at the front of the pack only after sexual harassment and infidelity charges forced Cain from the race in early December. Now Gingrich is fading fast and Paul again seems competitive to win the state, as the Ames no. 1 or 2 finishers have done in Iowa every Republican presidential cycle since 1979. And one of the few other candidates besides Paul to have devoted real on the ground time to campaigning in Iowa, former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum, is surging as social conservatives begin to consolidate their support.

The only half-joking buzz right now is that if Paul wins Iowa, the story won't be that Paul, 76 and on his third presidential race, is the future of the GOP, but that Iowa has taken yet another giant step toward making its own caucuses irrelevant. After all, a party process that elevates those who have little ability to run a competitive national race and who are far to the right of the national -- and GOP -- electorate is not one that is really helping that party out. Should former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney pull out a win after spending fewer than 20 days total in the state, it will show that devoting huge amounts of time and money trying to win Iowa may no longer be necessary. Whatever the outcome Tuesday, skeptics conclude, Iowa's best days as the first state in the presidential nominating contest may be over.

Both those itching to dismiss a Paul victory and those predicting Iowa will fade from the political scene are getting ahead of themselves.

Iowa will be just as -- if not more -- relevant in future presidential cycles for one unflagging reason: Democrats. Iowa does the Democratic Party good for all the same reasons it exerts a right-ward pull on an already right of center GOP: its largely white, heavily rural, somewhat older caucus-going population. Argues Michael Crowley in "Why Iowa Shouldn't Vote First Anymore" in Time magazine, "With every passing decade, Iowa's electoral character grows more out of step with the reality of the United States." The GOP caucus-electorate in 2008 was 70 percent rural or exurban; 60 percent born-again or evangelical Christian; and majority male. That's hardly what America looks like.

The picture is less conservative and more urban and female at Democratic caucuses, but not wildly more representative in other ways. This is exactly what the party of New York and Los Angeles, of Austin and Cambridge and San Francisco and yes, Washington, D.C., needs. A candidate who can win favor with progressive-minded farmers and moderate insurance processors from mid-sized cities is more likely to have broad appeal outside the cosmopolitan metropoles. Iowa Democrats have helped give their party three nominees -- Barack Obama, John Kerry and Jimmy Carter -- and unlike Iowa Republicans, shown no signs of moving radically away from the mainstream in recent years.

And while it is safe to say that Ron Paul is not going to be president of the United States, no matter what Iowa decides, his strength in Iowa has reflected something real afoot in the land. His ability to draw backers is not just a function of organizational prowess and devotion to Iowa, where he has spent fewer days than either Bachmann or Santorum, according to the Des Moines Register. There has been an intensification of libertarian sympathies in the electorate as a whole in recent years, with indicators of libertarian views reaching an all-time polling high in 2011, according to CNN. Paul has both encouraged that shift and benefited from it. This has gone hand in hand with the rise of the Tea Party, whose members have higher than average regard for libertarianism. A December 28 Pew Research Center survey found that "People who agree with the Tea Party movement see libertarianism positively by a 51 percent to 36 percent margin" -- a higher percentage of positive views than among Republicans overall, only 34 percent of whom look on the philosophy favorably. Younger voters were the most libertarian; those under 30 had positive views of libertarianism by a 50 percent to 28 percent margin. Not a huge surprise then that when Bachmann's Iowa campaign chairman defected, he went to the libertarian Paul, not the socially conservative Santorum.

A Paul victory in Iowa would represent the continuation -- with a twist -- of the story of the transformation of the GOP primary electorate that saw primary victories by Tea Party candidates Christine O'Donnell in Delaware, Sharon Angle in Nevada, Joe Miller in Alaska and others in 2010. That's not so out of step with America, after all.

Alternatively, a Romney win here, followed by a blow-out in New Hampshire, his strongest state, would ratify him as front-runner, clear the field of any candidates who thought they could get away with skipping Iowa entirely, and radically undermining the ability of most of Romney's remaining competitors to raise funds. Having thus laid its bet on the likely GOP nominee, Iowa's importance in the presidential nominating calendar would emerge more secure than ever.

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Five days after Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico, its devastating impact is becoming clearer.

Five days after Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico, its devastating impact is becoming clearer. Most of the U.S. territory currently has no electricity or running water, fewer than 250 of the island’s 1,600 cellphone towers are operational, and damaged ports, roads, and airports are slowing the arrival and transport of aid. Communication has been severely limited and some remote towns are only now being contacted. Jenniffer Gonzalez, the Resident Commissioner of Puerto Rico, told the Associated Press that Hurricane Maria has set the island back decades.

A small group of programmers wants to change how we code—before catastrophe strikes.

There were six hours during the night of April 10, 2014, when the entire population of Washington State had no 911 service. People who called for help got a busy signal. One Seattle woman dialed 911 at least 37 times while a stranger was trying to break into her house. When he finally crawled into her living room through a window, she picked up a kitchen knife. The man fled.

The 911 outage, at the time the largest ever reported, was traced to software running on a server in Englewood, Colorado. Operated by a systems provider named Intrado, the server kept a running counter of how many calls it had routed to 911 dispatchers around the country. Intrado programmers had set a threshold for how high the counter could go. They picked a number in the millions.

The greatest threats to free speech in America come from the state, not from activists on college campuses.

The American left is waging war on free speech. That’s the consensus from center-left to far right; even Nazis and white supremacists seek to wave the First Amendment like a bloody shirt. But the greatest contemporary threat to free speech comes not from antifa radicals or campus leftists, but from a president prepared to use the power and authority of government to chill or suppress controversial speech, and the political movement that put him in office, and now applauds and extends his efforts.

The most frequently cited examples of the left-wing war on free speech are the protests against right-wing speakers that occur on elite college campuses, some of which have turned violent.New York’s Jonathan Chait has described the protests as a “war on the liberal mind” and the “manifestation of a serious ideological challenge to liberalism—less serious than the threat from the right, but equally necessary to defeat.” Most right-wing critiques fail to make such ideological distinctions, and are far more apocalyptic—some have unironically proposed state laws that define how universities are and are not allowed to govern themselves in the name of defending free speech.

A growing body of research debunks the idea that school quality is the main determinant of economic mobility.

One of the most commonly taught stories American schoolchildren learn is that of Ragged Dick, Horatio Alger’s 19th-century tale of a poor, ambitious teenaged boy in New York City who works hard and eventually secures himself a respectable, middle-class life. This “rags to riches” tale embodies one of America’s most sacred narratives: that no matter who you are, what your parents do, or where you grow up, with enough education and hard work, you too can rise the economic ladder.

A body of research has since emerged to challenge this national story, casting the United States not as a meritocracy but as a country where castes are reinforced by factors like the race of one’s childhood neighbors and how unequally income is distributed throughout society. One such study was published in 2014, by a team of economists led by Stanford’s Raj Chetty. After analyzing federal income tax records for millions of Americans, and studying, for the first time, the direct relationship between a child’s earnings and that of their parents, they determined that the chances of a child growing up at the bottom of the national income distribution to ever one day reach the top actually varies greatly by geography. For example, they found that a poor child raised in San Jose, or Salt Lake City, has a much greater chance of reaching the top than a poor child raised in Baltimore, or Charlotte. They couldn’t say exactly why, but they concluded that five correlated factors—segregation, family structure, income inequality, local school quality, and social capital—were likely to make a difference. Their conclusion: America is land of opportunity for some. For others, much less so.

One hundred years ago, a retail giant that shipped millions of products by mail moved swiftly into the brick-and-mortar business, changing it forever. Is that happening again?

Amazon comes to conquer brick-and-mortar retail, not to bury it. In the last two years, the company has opened 11 physical bookstores. This summer, it bought Whole Foods and its 400 grocery locations. And last week, the company announced a partnership with Kohl’s to allow returns at the physical retailer’s stores.

Why is Amazon looking more and more like an old-fashioned retailer? The company’s do-it-all corporate strategy adheres to a familiar playbook—that of Sears, Roebuck & Company. Sears might seem like a zombie today, but it’s easy to forget how transformative the company was exactly 100 years ago, when it, too, was capitalizing on a mail-to-consumer business to establish a physical retail presence.

The foundation of Donald Trump’s presidency is the negation of Barack Obama’s legacy.

It is insufficient to statethe obvious of Donald Trump: that he is a white man who would not be president were it not for this fact. With one immediate exception, Trump’s predecessors made their way to high office through the passive power of whiteness—that bloody heirloom which cannot ensure mastery of all events but can conjure a tailwind for most of them. Land theft and human plunder cleared the grounds for Trump’s forefathers and barred others from it. Once upon the field, these men became soldiers, statesmen, and scholars; held court in Paris; presided at Princeton; advanced into the Wilderness and then into the White House. Their individual triumphs made this exclusive party seem above America’s founding sins, and it was forgotten that the former was in fact bound to the latter, that all their victories had transpired on cleared grounds. No such elegant detachment can be attributed to Donald Trump—a president who, more than any other, has made the awful inheritance explicit.

National Geographic Magazine has opened its annual photo contest, with the deadline for submissions coming up on November 17.

National Geographic Magazine has opened its annual photo contest for 2017, with the deadline for submissions coming up on November 17. The Grand Prize Winner will receive $10,000 (USD), publication in National Geographic Magazine and a feature on National Geographic’s Instagram account. The folks at National Geographic were, once more, kind enough to let me choose among the contest entries so far for display here. The captions below were written by the individual photographers, and lightly edited for style.

What the Trump administration has been threatening is not a “preemptive strike.”

Donald Trump lies so frequently and so brazenly that it’s easy to forget that there are political untruths he did not invent. Sometimes, he builds on falsehoods that predated his election, and that enjoy currency among the very institutions that generally restrain his power.

That’s the case in the debate over North Korea. On Monday, The New York Timesdeclared that “the United States has repeatedly suggested in recent months” that it “could threaten pre-emptive military action” against North Korea. On Sunday, The Washington Post—after asking Americans whether they would “support or oppose the U.S. bombing North Korean military targets” in order “to get North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons”—announced that “Two-thirds of Americans oppose launching a preemptive military strike.” Citing the Post’s findings, The New York Times the same day reported that Americans are “deeply opposed to the kind of pre-emptive military strike” that Trump “has seemed eager to threaten.”

More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.

One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”

Those mall trips are infrequent—about once a month. More often, Athena and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned. Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. “It’s good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”

The president has sided with Luther Strange in the primary matchup, a candidate who has lagged behind his challenger Roy Moore in polling.

Alabama Republicans head to the polls on Tuesday in a special election primary. The race pits former state attorney general Luther Strange against former judge Roy Moore in a fight for the Republican nomination in the race for the Senate seat vacated by Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Polls close at 8 p.m. EST.

Strange has President Trump’s endorsement and has benefited from millions of dollars in spending from political groups aligned with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Even so, Strange, who was temporarily appointed to the Senate seat in February by then-Alabama Governor Robert Bentley, has trailed in the polls, lagging behind his challenger. Moore is a conservative firebrand who was removed from the Alabama Supreme Court in 2003 after refusing to move a monument to the Ten Commandments from the state judicial building.